‘I’d give him a blow job just to get out of there’: Sexual citizenship and the social production of campus sexual assault

This chapter uses ethnographic data from research conducted with university undergraduates to show how the denial and erasure of young people’s sexual citizenship is one of the social roots of sexual assault. Rates of sexual violence are high on US college campuses, and the problem is frequently understood at the individual level: bad people intentionally causing harm to others. Using case studies of a white cishetero woman, a Black cishetero woman, and two queer students, we show how their vulnerability to sexual violence reflects having come of age in a context that failed to foster a sense of sexual citizenship, in combination with others’ (the assaulters) failure to recognise their sexual citizenship. This analysis points to structural and policy opportunities to reduce campus sexual violence through approaches to prevention that differ distinctly from the current emphasis on consent education and bystander interventions.